The City of Nanaimo says customer banking information is safe from a security breach that affected other municipalities that use the same online bill-paying software.

On Friday, the city learned about a cyber-threat to an application used to power web applications for online billing, licensing and tax statements. The threat could result in theft of customers’ login and password information, raising the spectre of unauthorized access to banking information.

Software firm Adobe issued a patch to block the vulnerability. Victoria and several other cities warned customers who use Mycity software to scan their bank statements. The city of Nanaimo did not issue such an alert, and nor will it. City staff apply all software security patches immediately when they are issued, and staff spent the weekend running software analysis to ensure nothing got missed.

“In this case, Nanaimo has not been affected,” said Guillermo Ferrero city of Nanaimo manager, business applications. “After we knew about this, we spent the weekend doing all kinds of testing. For IT people, there is no rest.”

The District of Oak Bay is warning residents to monitor their bank accounts after the municipality’s online servers were hacked.

The municipality said its oakbay.ca website was attacked on July 22.

A preliminary review has not found any evidence that residents’ personal information had been compromised, but residents who use Oak Bay’s pre-authorized withdrawal system to pre-pay taxes are being urged to contact their banks for advice.

The computer systems used do not store social insurance numbers, driver’s licence numbers, or credit or debit card numbers, but do contain the bank account numbers of about 1,500 residents as well as names and addresses.